


The Old Haunting Routine

by Thalius



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Bad Flirting, F/M, Family Bonding, Fluff and Humor, Gen, Haunted Houses, Just near the end though, Scaring Pirates, Suggestive Dialogue, just the ghost crew goofing off, set during season 1, this is extremely cheesy, this isn't scary at all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:54:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26918431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thalius/pseuds/Thalius
Summary: In which theGhostearns its name.
Relationships: Ezra Bridger & Kanan Jarrus, Kanan Jarrus/Hera Syndulla
Comments: 11
Kudos: 77





	The Old Haunting Routine

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a tumblr prompt I got a while ago, but it's Halloween season so I thought I'd clean it up and post it here.

Kanan had begun to doze off in the co-pilot chair when Hera gave a very deliberate  _ hmm _ , followed by her tapping her boot against his shin.

“Love.”

He rubbed at his eyes and blinked awake, sitting up straight in his chair. “Yeah, what’s up?”

She didn’t need to answer him. Looking out the cockipit’s viewport, he saw the nose of a transport tug peeking out overhead. A moment later the  _ Ghost _ shuddered, and he felt his stomach flip as they were caught in a tractor well.

“Great,” he muttered.

“They came out of nowhere,” Hera said, sounding more annoyed than upset. “Oh, look. They’re hailing us.” The communications light began to blink on the dashboard, and Hera keyed it on with an irritated press of her finger.

_ “Identify yourself!” _ growled a gravelly voice over the ship’s comm system.

Hera didn’t respond, turning instead to Kana. “Pirates, looks like. Feels like they’re getting ready to board.” She looked back at the ladder leading down into the hold, chewing her lip. “They can’t get what we’re hauling.”

“I know.” Kanan scratched at his jaw, frowning as he thought. He could hear footsteps on the deck as the other Spectres came to see what was going on. 

The cockpit door slid open a moment later, filled with Sabine, Zeb, and a sleepy-looking Ezra. “What’s going on? Wait, are those pirates?” Sabine asked, rushing up to the viewport and glaring up at the tug above them.

“Yeah, we’re trying to—”

“Carrion-One  _ to unidentified craft! Produce your signature or we will board!” _

“What a lame-ass ship name,” Sabine muttered. A worried frown scrunched her brow. “What are we gonna do?”

“We aren’t starting a firefight,” Hera said, and directed the comment at Zeb, who frowned.

“I didn’t say we should.”

“No shots  _ period,” _ Hera stressed. “I don’t need to remind everyone what we’re carrying.”

Small-yield mining explosives. Kanan had hauled the much larger, much more dangerous cousins of the Heralide-8 charges in their hold, but that was hardly the problem. They could still easily puncture the  _ Ghost’s _ hull if sufficiently disturbed, and that was the only detail that mattered.

“Does this happen a lot?” Ezra asked, and then flinched at the scraping sound above them. “What was that?”

“They’re manually docking to our airlock.” Hera sighed and looked to Kanan. “We could do the old haunted routine.”

He raised a brow, grinning. “Haven’t done that in a while.”

_ “Unidentified craft!” _ the voice shouted again over their comm, now truly furious.  _ “Prepare to be boarded!” _

“Quickly, then,” she said, and turned to the rest of the crew. “You heard us. Regular positions.”

“What positions?” Ezra asked, stepping out of the way as Zeb rushed past him through the door and Sabine slid down the ladder. “What’s happening?”

“You’re with me, kid,” Kanan assured him, then looked to Hera. “This’ll work even better with two of us. Don’t forget the lights.”

She gave him a mock salute, and he waved at Ezra. “Go get into the ducts,” he said. “Quickly. Above the galley.”

“Why?”

“Just do as I—”

They were interrupted with a horrendous wrenching sound, and the entire ship rocked again.

“They’re docked,” Hera said to both of them. “Go!”

* * *

Under the deck plating in the lounge, Kanan kept his eyes closed and listened to the footsteps above him. Hera had sent him an acknowledgement light on his comm to confirm she was in position, and now he felt for Ezra. He could feel the kid above the galley, just like he’d told him, but his heart was pounding. Unable to risk opening a line with the kid, he sent him a calming nudge instead. Then Kanan splayed his fingers against the plating above him and let the crew lounge take form in his mind. 

He felt around the room, unseen and undetected, as the pirates above him spoke in quiet tones to one another, annoyed they hadn’t found any crew yet. Hera had blacked out all light in the ship, a common scare tactic that didn’t seem to bother the pirates all that much, but they hadn’t seen anything yet.

When he realised Sabine had left her dishes on the table, Kanan grinned. With a flick of his hand, he shoved the bowl and the mug to the ground with considerable force, and heard the latter smash to pieces. He hoped it wasn’t one of their good ones.

“What the hell was that?”

“Who's there!?”

“Must be the tractor beam,” one of the pirates said. “Screwin’ with the gravity.”

“That isn’t how gravity works, moron.”

“Then how’d those bowls move?”

With another flick, Kanan knocked over a chair on the other side of the room. Boots stomped above him, backing away from the noise.

“The fuck is that?”

Kanan pulled up his comm and sent two green lights to Zeb, who was hiding in the storage compartment in the corner. A moment later, he heard the man bang against the side of the storage unit and began to howl like a dying wolf.

A few of the pirates unloaded their blasters on the compartment, yelling now. Knowing the reinforced plating would only hold so long, Kanan upped the ante. Tightening his hand into a fist, he used the Force to grab one of the pirates’ ankles and jerked him hard to the right, making the man cry out in surprise and terror—and lose his balance. He fell to the deck, his blaster clattering beside him. Kanan constricted the hold around his ankle.

“Something’s got me! Get it off!”

“Nothing’s on you! There’s nothing!”

“In there!”

The pirate in his grip howled while the others bolted for the galley. Unable to focus while using his comm, Kanan let go of the man and spammed the green acknowledgement light at Ezra. He hoped the kid had gotten the gist of what was going on; there hadn’t been a lot of time to explain. 

The pirate he’d been holding scrambled to his feet and ran, sobbing, into the galley after his compatriots. Kanan shimmied on his back and began to pull himself towards the kitchen. Each room in the  _ Ghost _ was sealed off completely to prevent ship-wide pressure loss in the event of a breach, even below deck. But he could get close enough to the door to bang on it.

He heard screaming coming from the galley and grinned. The kid had definitely gotten the right idea. Feeling for the bowl he’d thrown earlier, Kanan let it drift up to the galley door and began to use it as a cudgel, banging on it as hard as he could. Behind and above him, he heard Zeb laugh, still inside the storage compartment.

On cue, he saw the lights above begin to flicker rapidly on and off, just unevenly enough to not seem like a timed toggle—Chopper’s handiwork. Then the ship-wide comm opened up, and an eerie moaning crackled overhead.

By this point the pirates were in total hysterics. Doors opened and closed as they began to scramble, and one even ran into the bowl he’d been using to bang on the door, which only added to their panic. 

“This place is fucking haunted!” one of them screamed, sprinting for the door to the cockpit.

“What the fuck is—is that gas? What is that!?”

A telltale hiss cane from one of the vents—Sabine’s smoke bombs. 

“We’re gonna die! Run!”

“Fuck this place, fuck this ship, fuck this—”

The moaning over the comm system grew louder and more aggressive. Hera had perfected her recorded remix of purrgil noises, pitched low and garbled heavily enough that it sounded more like the vengeful baying of a demon and less like the big dumb animals that blocked hyperspace lanes. It even unsettled  _ him, _ and he’d helped her take the recordings.

Sabine, Chopper and Hera didn’t let up abovedecks, continuing to bang against the floorboards, leak smoke out of the vents, flicker the lights, and generally scare the ever-loving shit out of the pirates, who were now making for the airlock and would, hopefully, never return again. If they were even luckier, the pirates would warn their friends about this ship and stay far the hell away from it.

Now they just had to wait.

* * *

“That was—fucking awesome!”

“Language,” Kanan counseled, but Ezra was too excited to listen to him, bouncing on the balls of his feet and grinning ear-to-ear.

“You guys do that regularly?” he asked, eyes flicking rapidly between the crew, who were all back in the cockpit. “Like whenever you get boarded? Wait,  _ do _ you get boarded a lot?”

“Yes, no, and no,” Hera answered, swivelling around in her chair. “It works with smaller pirate crews. The Empire wouldn’t buy that act. And even if they did, they’d just blow up the  _ Ghost.” _

“Helps to have another Force-user around,” Kanan said. “Floating stuff really freaks them out. What did you do in the galley?”

“Oh, it was awesome!” Ezra held his hands out, drawing wide arcs in the air. “I flipped over the table, slammed the cupboards, and I lit all the stove burners. I tried to spray them with the sink hose too, but I couldn’t get the focus right, so the water was just on.”

“Did you turn the burners off afterwards?” Sabine asked, raising a brow. “Or the sink?”

Ezra stopped bouncing. “Uh. Hold on.”

The kid raced out of the cockpit, and Kanan exchanged a look with Hera. “Good work everyone,” he said, nodding to the others. “I’ll come down to help clean up in a sec.”

“I cleaned my bit up already,” Sabine said in protest, holding up her hands.

Hera frowned at her. “Everyone helps clean up. Go with Zeb and start scrubbing the carbon off the storage unit.”

“Ugh. Fine.”

“You, too, Chop,” Hera added. The droid blew a raspberry at her, but wheeled away after the others.

When the door shut, Hera looked back to Kanan, a grin on her face. “That went well, I think.”

“One of our finest,” he agreed. “Ezra really helped sell it. I’m jealous I didn’t think of the stove thing.”

Hera rested her cheek against a fist, mouth twitching. “You have dust all over your face.”

“Do I?” He wiped a palm across his cheek, making Hera laugh.

“You’re making it worse. Here, let me.”

She stood up from the pilot’s chair and pulled a rag from her pocket, reaching for his face with it. He ducked back, frowning suspiciously at her. “Is that thing clean?”

“Cleaner than your face,” she replied, and grabbed his chin. “Hold still.”

She wiped at his skin, running the rag over his cheekbones, down his nose, and then across his forehead. “It’s even in your hair,” she said with a laugh, shaking her head. “You might need a shower.”

“Are you offering to help?” he asked, and she gave him a look.

“You can take this with you,” she replied, dangling the rag in front of him. It was grey with dirt.

“I get no respect in this place.” He pulled her close, though, and she wrapped an arm around his neck. 

“That was fun,” she whispered, close enough now that her breath brushed across his jaw. It made him shiver. “It’s been a while.”

“I think you missed your calling,” he murmured. He didn’t kiss her, not yet, and smiled when she held her breath in anticipation. “You could run a wicked haunted house.”

“And you make a really good ghost,” she said back. He laughed when he felt her hand on his ass.

“They don’t call me Spectre One for nothing.”

She kissed him then, tired of waiting, but pulled back quickly, making him groan. “What is it?” he asked, already ducking for another kiss. She pecked him again, once, and then pressed a finger to his lips to stall him.

“Maybe I will take you up on that shower offer,” she murmured. His grin widened, and he kissed her finger.

“I’ll have you making the same sounds on your recording in no time. The crew’ll think this place is haunted for real.”

Hera rolled her eyes, entirely unimpressed. “You are a true gentleman, Kanan Jarrus.” She shoved his chest, pushing away from him, but she was smiling. “Come on. You promised to help clean up.”

He sighed theatrically in defeat. “Alright. Shower after?”

“If you don’t call me a purrgil again.”

He sputtered, watching her swagger away. “I wasn’t—that isn’t what I meant!”

Hera turned and threw the rag at him. He could’ve easily caught it, but he let it fall over his head instead. “Then quit talking and get to work.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he muffled, and coughed when dust filled his mouth. 


End file.
